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Managing Mobile Applications with Umbraco

Traditionally Umbraco is used for building Websites and Corporate Intranets thanks to its broad .NET developer support and its intuitive end user Content Management System (CMS) controls.

However Umbraco needn’t be limited to just managing website content. It can be extended to manage and deliver content regardless of consumption medium.

In a mobile application paradigm we can extend Umbraco with a JSON web service delivering the same application content regardless of device interface variances without the need for a website.

A client specialising in audio tours and guides approached Sumac for a mobile tour guide content management system initially for Apple iOS devices. The client required a way to manage and package this content to support a "freemium" model based application.

Given the extensibility of Umbraco we realised this would be an obvious choice.

We integrated custom tour mapping controls for curating tour guides together with audio media and the ability to provide "point of interest" content which can be displayed to a user based on GPS co-ordinates. This aggregated content would be packaged for either free or iTunes in-app purchase content for consumption within the iOS application.

The client additionally required the application to scale to tour delivery across multiple territories so high availability and redundancy was a concern. Again Umbraco proved suitable in this regard. By deploying content caching strategies and configuring Umbraco to distribute workload across multiple server instances the CMS was configured to deliver content and scale in tandem with business expansion.